The Diversity Council at Manhattan College: Limitations to Inclusion
By Deirdre Heavey, May 2021
Lasallian Values
Kelly green makes its way onto every corner of Manhattan College’s campus–green Jasper Ms, green COVID signage, green turf on Gaelic Park and green walls in the controversially named Kelly Commons. Complimentary to our kelly green school colors are the pale faces of our students and professors. In this sea of Irish-Jasper green and white, there is an absence of stories and representation of Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).
Manhattan College was established as a Lasallian Catholic college by the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1853 in Saint John Baptist De La Salle’s name. The Lasallian values echo mantras around campus like “Inclusive Community” and “Respect for all People.” Along with a Lasallian education, Manhattan College presents a series of opportunities for students to serve marginalized communities–through L.O.V.E. social justice immersion trips, the Lasallian Outreach Collaborative (L.O.Co.) or Service Saturdays in Manhattan. Despite the College’s commitment to social justice and community service, the whiteness of a college in the Bronx has not been lost on the new wave of students who consider Manhattan College home. White, cisgender men comprise the faculty, administrative staff, board of trustees as well as those honored with portraits and commemorated with buildings around campus. President Brennan O'Donnell is the first non-Christian Brother ever to reside as president of Manhattan College, revealing the College’s deep Lasallian roots.
Despite Manhattan College’s Bronx location, the student demographic fails to represent that of its home borough. The population of the Bronx is 44.8% Black, 56.4% Hispanic and 44.7% white, courtesy of the 2019 U.S. Census Bureau. Conversely, the Manhattan College student population is 4.7% Black, 20.8% Hispanic and 56.8% white, per 2017-18 IPEDS data reported by Forbes. The Bronx community is not represented on the Manhattan College campus. For the less than 30% students of color who do attend Manhattan College, many transfer after struggling to find that sense of community on campus. Students of color who decide to stick it out report, time and time again, they feel unheard and often berated by professors and administrators.
On May 31, 2020, an anonymous student created @letstalkaboutitmc on Instagram as “a page where Manhattan College students can freely talk about their experiences on campus, where they've felt out of place or discriminated against.” Since its creation, there have been over 100 submissions posted, many outlining individual experiences with racist professors and administrators.
“I experienced discrimination as an employee and when I attempted to file a complaint anonymously through HR, my letter was sent directly to the source which is a breach of confidentiality,” said an alumni of color who spent eight years working in the Office of Enrollment, four after graduating. “Shortly after I began to experience harassment and retaliation.”
They inevitably decided to quit their job, leaving behind the alma mater they considered home for eight years. Other students reported experiencing racism during their undergraduate experience as well.
“My family is from Ecuador and Brazil on my mom’s side and Dominican on my dad’s side,” a student who began her freshman year at Manhattan College in 2011 wrote on Instagram. “Every time I would mention that, they would bring up the L.O.V.E. trips they would do and say they felt sorry about the ‘dangerous’ circumstances my family lives in. I would often correct them, telling them my family lived in the city and had nothing to do with their L.O.V.E. trips.”
While the L.O.V.E. trips promote engagement with social justice and encourage students to step outside their comfort zone, these types of “voluntourism” trips run the risk of benefitting the individual rather than the community. Manhattan College students are guaranteed a meaningful experience, however, short-term international immersion trips often fail to implement long-term structural change. They can also lead to misconceptions about life in other countries. One of the faculty leaders on a recent L.O.V.E. trip to Israel, where students had the unique opportunity to learn about the Israeli-Palestine conflict, was rumored to have made several racist comments throughout the trip.
“While on a L.O.V.E. trip to Bethlehem, [they] told myself and two other students that ‘every brown person in Jerusalem looks the same,’ and she could not ‘keep track’ of the one person of color on our trip because she ‘blended in,'” reported an anonymous student to @letstalkaboutitmc. “[they] laughed. Later on during the trip, [the woman of color] formed an alliance and planned to confront her after days of racist, anti-Semitic and classist arguments with students.”
Accountability is challenging on a campus where administrators, particularly white cisgender men, maintain power for decades. The College has reaffirmed its alliance with its problematic past rather than its progressive potential through its dismissal or suppression of racial controversies. While this professor is now a part of the problem, she is also a product of the system as an alumnus. She has spent her life on a campus that opts to paint over racist propaganda rather confront the culture that promotes it.
One particularly scarring submission to @letstalkaboutitmc was the “Whites Only!” sign plastered above a water fountain alongside a printed photo of Brother Jasper, the school’s mascot. Another detailed circumstance of cultural appropriation and blackface, “One guy dressed in baggy jeans, brown paint and a literal mop in an attempt to be Lil Wayne. Another dressed as Kanye West. Brown paint,” said a student from the class of 2012.
Every student seems to have their own story with racism or discrimination–whether experienced first-hand or witnessed. However, the robust marketing of our Lasallian values maintains a contradictory narrative, the stories of racism slip through the cracks, covered up by administrators and left to bear by the students of color who are subjected to such ugliness.
A Racial Reckoning
President Brennan O’Donnell sent an email to all Manhattan College students and employees to condemn the murder of George Floyd, Ahmaud Armery and Breonna Taylor on May 31, 2020. It was the same day @letstalkaboutitmc was created. By June 6–amidst the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests around the country–President O’Donnell emailed students and employees, once again, to announce the creation of a Diversity Council “to promote dialogue, seek meaningful change and build a truly inclusive educational environment at the College.” O’Donnell said administrators had been working for several months to create the Diversity Council, but “they could think of no better time” to announce its inauguration.
The goals of the Diversity Council are the recruitment and retention of students and faculty of color, meaningful change to the campus climate, inclusion of race and ethnicity as a college wide core competency, fostering community engagement and partnerships and the creation of institutional framework to support and sustain diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. These six goals are ambitious, particularly when the College’s racist roots have been underscored by its lack of transparency and accountability.
The Black Student Union was not recognized as an official club at Manhattan College until July 2020. Mamady Ballo, the President of the Black Student Union, joined me in a Google Meet at the end of February 2021. We spoke candidly about our frustration with the administration’s orchestration of the Diversity Council as well as with their historic failure to listen to students and faculty of color.
“Why did it have to take all of that for us to be an official club and to actually have a seat at the table?” Ballo asked. “You should have done it a long time ago, and I’m sorry but you’re a little bit too late.”
When Ballo heard about the creation of a Diversity Council, she couldn’t understand why the Black Student Union had not been invited to have that seat at the table. In order to really understand how racism operates at Manhattan College, Ballo knew the Council needed to listen to the experiences of the Black Student Union. Ballo requested to represent the Black Student Union on the Diversity Council herself–not waiting for a seat at the table, but reaching out and grabbing a chair. However, Ballo has not felt heard since joining the Council. She’s frustrated with the administrative process and doesn’t understand why members of the Council would prefer to send out a survey rather than listen to students’ voices.
Students and faculty from every race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religion are now represented on the Diversity Council. DeVaughn Harris, Vice President of Residential Affairs and Student Government Representative on the Diversity Council, was an integral member in the orchestration of the Diversity Council through his conversations with Brennan O’Donnell and Sheetal Kale, Director of Equity, Diversity and Chief Title IX Coordinator, over the summer. Harris asked Nadia Itani, a senior Civil Engineering major and member of Student Government, to join the Council because she is a student leader committed to creating change on campus. On the Manhattan College website, Itani is listed as the “Muslim Student Representative.”
When I spoke with Itani, she admitted that she could not speak to the effectiveness of the Diversity Council because she was unable to attend any of the meetings for her “Campus Climate” subgroup due to scheduling conflicts. Conversations were held throughout the fall semester, but Itani was unable to contribute her insights. Each member’s “role” on the Council is listed on Manhattan College’s website; it’s the community’s clearest conception of who the Council is and what they represent. Aside from a few names on the school website, the community only hears from the Diversity Council when they send an email blast condemning the most recent racist attack in the United States.
DeVaughn Harris mimicked Ballo’s disappointments with the Council. While he thinks the Diversity Council has the potential to achieve racial justice at Manhattan College, it’s only a start. Harris is interested in seeing more dialogue on campus, broadening the scope of these conversations to multiple disciplines.
“Learn from people around you,” Harris said. “Listen to your students who are people of color. They have some experiences that are very valuable, and they can teach you a lot if you just listen. I want to see people who are open and willing to change. Just like white faculty, white students should listen to their classmates who are people of color. There have been times when I have been pushed back against in class because my answer wasn’t relative to the canon of discipline or it didn’t seem orthodox. What if people just stopped and listened? We all want to be heard, so give people a chance to be heard.”
Sheetal Kale, Director of Equity, Diversity and Chief Title IX Coordinator, has spearheaded the Diversity Council since its inception. With a background in anti-discrimination law, she has a depth of knowledge and experience on the implementation of diversity and inclusion efforts. However, as the spokesperson for the Diversity Council, Kale has been under scrutiny for the inaction students feel on campus.
“I hope people feel like things are being done because they are happening in the background,” Kale said. “I know that’s not as exciting, but I’m too serious about this work to be performative about it.”
While members of the Diversity Council are engaging in dialogue pertaining to the campus climate and designing anti-racist curriculum, the Council is not inviting all corners of the College to engage in these conversations. Concerned with how anti-racist workshops and intergroup dialogues would translate virtually, as many programs were hosted via Google Meet during the 2020-2021 academic year, Kale didn’t feel the work would be worth it. While she admitted those workshops may have been needed this year, Kale said change would be more visible in the 2021-2022 academic year. The Black Student Union, the Lasallian Women and Gender Resource Center (LWGRC) and the Multicultural Center picked up where the Diversity Council faltered during the 2020-2021 academic year to ensure the student body had access to these important conversations. Meanwhile, the student body is left wondering what exactly the Diversity Council is doing to evoke the change we are so desperate to see.
Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a religious studies professor on the Council, said she was suspicious of whether tokenism played a role in the Diversity Council when she first heard about it. “What is this for?” she asked. “Is this for a brochure? We didn’t want that. Also, if you want us to do work for you, why don’t you pay us? This is extra work that is notoriously underpaid. A couple faculty members and I wrote to Sheetal, and told her this should be compensated.” The Council poses the threat of calling upon students and faculty of color, who are already underpaid, to do the work for the College to say they are anti-racist. While Imperatori-Lee is a proponent of the racial justice talks on campus this past semester, she said it cannot stop there.
“Bringing speakers to campus and then gathering around to have a conversation cannot be the work of [the Diversity Council],” Imperatori-Lee said. “That would be a huge waste of our time. The Provost needs to hire Black people. It’s important to talk about why there haven’t historically been Black people in these roles, but not nearly as important as hiring Black people.”
Conversations about racial justice have been whispered through the halls of Manhattan College for as long as I have been a student here. Each year, our community adapts, learns and grows in our pursuit of racial justice, but we remain unconvinced that Manhattan College wants to change with us.
